#spp_writing

He leans in close, hanging an arm over a knee. Watches Riko's face as he blinks dazedly at the kit. A hand hovers. Goes for something.

Vetch sees the change on his face before he registers the motion on his periphery.

Riko’s fist, low and fast, arcing toward him.

Vetch's reflexes kick in. He tips back; a crisp, exact maneuver that leaves him just outside the arc. A glimpse of Riko; teeth bared, eyes dark and narrowed with intent.

The swing is more desperate than it is forceful. Still, it's a close call. Plastic skids across his collarbone. Leaves a clean sting behind.

Vetch catches Riko's wrist easily. He turns the hand, looks at what is in his grip. An injector, the needle out. A fast-acting sedative.

He squeezes until Riko lets go. It falls to the floor with a small, plastic clatter.

Vetch touches his other hand to the scrape on his collarbone.

"A souvenir. Sweet of you."

Riko’s weight tugs at Vetch’s grip. He’s slipping down sideways, boneless. Vetch eases him down gently, lays Riko’s hand down next to the cheek that’s pressed into the ground.

The stubborn tamp of Riko's mouth is gone now. His breathing breaks through in short, rhythmic stutters; the sound of effort collapsing.

Tears leak from his eyes unnoticed, dotting the concrete. His eyes are hazing, the fury in them dimming with the effects of the stim.

Vetch is drawn in like a moth. He dips a careful finger into a wet spot on the ground. Smears it out as far as it will go, until the moisture peters out under his fingertip.

“God," he whispers. "You’re beautiful like this.”

Riko is fading again, used up already. His gut patch is soaked through. That last move had restarted the bleeding.

Vetch rolls the third stim between his fingers. One of the good ones. Red.

+++++++++++++++++++

He sits cross-legged beside Riko.

“Last one,” he says softly. “Gotta make it count.”

No response.

Vetch brushes sweat-damp hair from Riko’s face. Smooths blood from his chin with a thumb.

He touches the stim into the soft tissue just above the collarbone and triggers it.

Riko comes back gasping. A deep, awful sound. His eyes are wide. Horrified.

His eyes find Vetch, just for a moment. And then they slide right off. It's only been seconds, but Riko's gaze is already fragmenting.

He's barely surfaced and he's sinking again. Vetch knows he has precious few moments for the next part.

He guides Riko upright, tugging at him insistently, as if he is helping a drunk friend sit up. “There we go.”

Riko makes a small sound, like a child waking from a fever. His hand is over his gut, but loose, like he can't remember why he had it there.

Vetch crouches beside him.

"Riko," he whispers.

The word means nothing to a brain starved of oxygen. But the tone…

Something in it makes Riko still, just for a second.

“Hey... hey... look at me.” Soft, like a lover.

Riko doesn't.

The moment slips past untouched.

“Come on. You’ve got this. Stay with me.” Firmer now, like a leader coaxing strength.

Riko reacts, but not toward him. Something in him veers away.

Vetch reaches for the back of Riko’s neck. Cups it in his palm, thumb brushing quiet arcs along the hairline. Quiet, gentle contact.

“No one’s going to hurt you now,” he murmurs. Warm and enveloping.

Not fatherly. Something older. Something he knows will land deeper.

“You’re not alone.”

Riko is beyond thinking, beyond recognition. But he blinks slow, turns minutely toward Vetch.

Something opens, just a crack. It's all Vetch needs.

Vetch lets his hand slide forward, cradling the planes of Riko’s face. A thumb brushes away the blood and tears in one long, smooth stroke.

“You're safe,” he says, voice pitched low and warm.

And Riko, who has held himself through pain, failure, and mockery, finally gives himself over.

His head falls forward, and Vetch catches his cheek in his palm. Riko surrenders his weight into Vetch’s hand. Like a bird nestling into a hunter’s grasp.

Vetch smile stretches slow across his face. Soft. Satisfied.

“This,” he whispers, forehead touching Riko’s, “is the part I’ll remember.”

He holds him like that a moment longer.

Before his hand goes to the belt around Riko's leg.

He unbuckles it slowly, with care.

Riko's eyes flick towards it. His mouth moves but there is no sound. His hand drifts toward the belt, too low, too slow. It sags just before reaching it.

Vetch pulls the belt free.

Riko's gaze barely follows it, eyes emptying.

The result is immediate. Blood wells out of the wound, spills over the fabric of his leg. Unstoppable.

The weight of Riko's head is still in his hand.

Vetch leans in. Watches the pupils go wide and dark, the blinks slowing.

Breath brushes into his palm, light and staccato.

The lids drift halfway down. Don't rise again.

And he begins to fall.

Vetch catches him. Lowers him slow. Sets him down the way he would’ve landed.

He feels the fall move through his hands. Quiet. Complete. Claimed.

Small, wet, ugly sounds slip out of the slack mouth. Vetch can tell; Riko is absent. These are-- and his mind flicks to the medical manuals again-- agonal breaths. A body's final, mindless mimicry of breath.

Vetch thinks it's the most honest thing he's heard from Riko, ever.

Even as the body sags and stills, one hand keeps flexing in the air. It is not reaching for anything anymore. Just nerves firing without meaning.

Vetch leans forward and closes his own hand over Riko's. Softly.

"There now," he whispers. “You’re through the worst of it.”

He waits. Feeling Riko’s hand move gently in his, until it finally goes still.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Vetch stays on, as the blood slows its spread, and Riko's body goes slack in stages.

Vetch sits in the moment, with the air of a man still enraptured by the last luminous notes of a song hanging in the air.

This quiet, this stillness, it could so easily be mistaken for emptiness. But Vetch knows better.

He tilts his head. Studies the body with unhurried calm. The hand in his grasp is cooling, but he doesn’t let go. He runs a thumb slowly across the calluses on Riko’s palm, traces each one carefully. Trying to commit the feel of them into memory.

He has so many of them; memories. All of them snatched from a distance. A grin in passing. A glimpse of Riko's hands pressing down on a bloody, torn uniform, barely glimpsed through the chaos of a post-battle medic tent. His fingers, worrying at the edge of a bottle label; his laughter sparking under the clutter of bar chatter.

So many. But none of them his, not really.

But this. This is his.

Shifting position, he eases the body gently onto its back. Clothes cling to skin, soaked through with red.

He unfastens the collar, baring the throat and upper chest. Examines the bruises. The cuts. A finger drifts along the collarbone, pauses where it's kinked in the middle.

Vetch turns the face into the light. The head rolls easily... no resistance now.

Then both hands close over the throat. A gentle squeeze. Under Vetch's grip, something inside shifts brokenly. Blood wells up. Fills the mouth and spills slowly down the sides of the face.

“I always wondered what it would take to shut you up,” he whispers.

He lets go. Runs his thumb across the slack mouth, pressing the lips out of shape.

A sense of grateful wonder fills Vetch's chest. To see Riko this way, so pliant and unresistant. Not with a smirk quirking his lips, or his smart mouth talking, trying to manipulate attention away from himself.

Away, always away.

Now, finally still. Finally here, with him.

Two fingers push through. Past parted lips, lax and yielding. Past the still tongue, slick with blood, and to the back of his throat. No gag reflex.

He pulls back, wipes his hand on his thigh, and stands.

Despite standing a full head beneath him, Riko always took up more space than his frame warranted.

But now, from this angle, the slumped figure under him looks so much smaller. As if some internal framework has collapsed, left him hollow and folded into himself.

Experimentally, he nudges the side of the ribcage with his boot.

The body rocks. Loose and unanchored. Like... a thing. He watches the movement with fascination.

He leans in once more. His hand is slow with care as he runs his hand through hair pressed flat with sweat and blood.

He stays a while longer. Silent. Simply beholding. The moment too deep for words.

Eventually, the moment thins.

And then it is gone.

He straightens up. “Goodnight, Riko,” he mutters.

He kicks the body in the ribs. Hard enough for it to roll, landing in a slump against the wall.

A hand flops, landing palm up on the ground.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Selah Arc: Tourniquet ▸ Goodnight ▸ Knife ▸ Duck and Weave ▸ Battle After Battle ▸ Maintenance Corridor ▸ Now I Can See You ▸ Choreographed

Selah whump-only path: Maintenance Corridor ▸ Now I Can See You ▸ Tourniquet ▸ Goodnight

<< Masterlist

You go from being a normal person, with a normal level of enthusiasm for normal things, to being assaulted by a vision so all encompassing that it would take physical restraints to keep you from writing it out immediately. And God help you if you're at work or in a situation that requires you to be present. Because you're distracted. Your mind keeps swerving back to the story in your head. Every time people interrupt you, it takes everything you've got not to hiss at them like a starving vampire kept from feeding. Maybe the scene is already fully formed in your head and you just need to feverishly manifest the words into the real world... or maybe its more an emotion or a SHAPE of something that you need to find the words to describe. In either case, it's SPECIFIC, and it's CLEAR. Like you've been shown a diagram and then told, YOU NEED TO COPY THIS OUT EXACTLY. And you do. When you get the chance, you lock in and commit to pulling it out of yourself, rope by bloody rope, with an intensity so intensely INTENSE, that people are strategising how to safely throw holy water on you from a safe distance.

This... process-- because it's gone beyond just writing-- it feels like an excavation, an unearthing. And you're catching glimpses of the moist, wriggling parts of yourself that you think might have done better staying uncovered. Then you're done.

You're depleted. Utterly spent from the sustained effort of birthing this thing into reality. And you're a different creature now. You shed something along the way, and you're not quite sure what.

You read what you've written.